Abstracts, Review,
A Journal of the Fernand Braudel Center

Review, XIII, 2, Spring, 1990

Andre Gunder Frank, "A Theoretical Introduction to 5,000 Years of World System History"

A historical-materialist political economy of our world system suggests that its unified historical development in Asia, Africa, and Europe goes back at least 5,000 years, during most of which its centers were outside the West. Historical fact does not support, and holistic theory does not justify, the widespread neglect, rejection of, or reservations against, the study of the world system before AD 1500 by Eurocentric historians, civilizationists, and historical macrosociologists. Long before 1500, most parts of medieval and ancient Asio-Afro-Europe would not have been as they then were (and now are) without their systemic political economic and cultural relations with other parts of the world and especially Central Asia, as well as with the world system as a whole. For at least five millennia, this world system has systematically interlinked technological change and accumulation; continental scale and maritime migrations, trade and exchange of surplus; the related and changing political, economic, and cultural institutions; and the resulting competition, alliances, and war through center-periphery-hinterland structures, hegemonic and other cycles, and other world-embracing or diffusing developments.

Walter Goldfrank, "Current Issues in World-Systems Theory"

The world-systems approach has gained acceptance as a major competing paradigm for analyzing modern social change. It has accomplished important historical reinterpretation but has not fully escaped from state-based to zonal analyses. It has reproduced hoary social science controversies: economism, part/whole relations, determinism/voluntarism. Changes in the 1980's confirm its basic validity. Among major challenges for future work are understanding the kinds and degrees of contemporary peripheral immiseration and undermining the idea of (national) development in theory and practice.

Harriet Friedmann, "Rethinking Capitalism and Hierarchy"

The debates of the 1970's focused on what some called precapitalist elements of the world-economy, mainly in the Third World. After a decade and a half, attention has shifted to the state socialist sphere, which some call postcapitalist. The Cold War and detente should not be subsumed within a model of hierarchy, but should be understood as relations between blocs. This essay (1) criticizes the expressive totality of Wallerstein's Modern World-System; (2) suggests ways of thinking about "regulation" as international and transnational; (3) offers a thought experiment, using Wallerstein's concepts of "external arena" and "world-empire," to construct an alternative interpretation of Russia/Soviet Union, which suggests differences within a structured totality; and (4) proposes four propositions to guide further explorations of the relationship between the world-economy and the state system.

Fred Block, "Capitalism versus Socialism in World-Systems Theory"

World-systems theory was very much influenced by the Cold War context in which the theory developed. The result was that the Cold War polarity between capitalism and socialism is reproduced in the theory. Moreover, since capitalism is defined expansively in world-systems theory, socialism had to be defined in terms of the end of the commodity form. There are, however, serious problems with that way of conceptualizing socialism. The proposed alternative is to recognize that the nineteenth-century categories of capitalism and socialism are no longer adequate and that there are a multitude of different institutional forms for organizing economic activity.

Janet Abu-Lughod, "Restructuring the Premodern World-System"

Wallerstein's field-shaking innovations are becoming "normal science" as scholars add more precise details to the story of the West's rise to hegemony; furthermore, the term "world system" has become virtually synonymous with the particular way the world came to be organized after the sixteenth century. These two tendencies make it difficult to recognize pre- and post-modern world-systems or to analyze crucial moments of restructuring. This article describes a preexisting thirteenth-century world-system, organized according to principles quite different from the ®modern" world-system and contends that a new pattern of world system organization is already appearing, one in which the Pacific has supplanted the Atlantic as the zone of expansion and dynamism in a fully globalized and restructured world-system. If this current restructuring is to be understood, a better theory of systemic change will be needed than the one usually invoked to explain the "Rise of the West" and, by default, the "Fall of the East." This paper develops such a theory, using the earlier transition as a model of analysis.

Immanuel Wallerstein, "World-Systems Analysis: The Second Phase"

World-systems analysis in its first phase has made the case for (a) the world-system as the "units of analysis"; (b) the importance of the longue durée; and (c) a particular definition of the set of defining characteristics of the capitalist world-economy. In the second phase, there are new issues to preoccupy us: (a) elaboration of world-systems other than that of the capitalist world-economy; (b) elaboration of definition and measurement of polarization within the capitalist world-economy; (c) the historical choices that are before us in the future; and (d) overcoming the conceptual trinity of economy (market), polity (state), and society (culture) as representing separate arenas of social action.

Review, XIII, 3, Summer, 1990

Silviu Brucan, "Historical Evolution of Classes and Class Policy in the U.S.S.R."

Starting from the premise that the evolution of social forces is the most enduring facet of the historical process, the author reconstructs the social history of the U.S.S.R., eastern Europe, and China, concluding that the industrial worker of peasant origin became the ideal social base of the Communist Party. The scientific-technological revolution, however, diminished the number, social status, and prestige of the manual workers, while increasing those of the intellectuals. Instead of social homogenization, we witness social differentiation in Eastern societies and with the introduction of market mechanisms a large middle-class is in the making. Therefore, political pluralism is no longer an option, it is a must.

Etienne Balibar, "The Nation Form: History and Ideology"

Part of ongoing research on the deep structures of racism and nationalism in contemporary politics, the article focuses on the specific sociological and anthropological dimensions of the "Nation Form." Part I indicates the latent prerequisites that have made the national formation both an obsession and a theoretical blind spot of modern historiography. Marxism itself, while inverting the dominant pattern of explanation, has not escaped this shortcoming. Another step has to be taken in the historicization of such concepts as "social formation," "reproduction," and "transition." Part II proposes a framework to this effect. It is centered on three main ideas: (1) nations are neither universal stages of evolution of the state nor creations of an already given "bourgeois class," but structures imposed upon societies by one among several "bourgeois political forms," because of its utility in the class struggle; (2) nationalization of society is a permanent but also an uneven and contradictory process, which achieves a certain stability only insofar as it merges nationalism and social policy within the institutional and imaginary structures of "fictive ethnicity"; (3) nictive ethnicity itself is continuously reproduced (mainly through the operation of the family and the educational system) in two forms--genetic ("racial") identity and linguistic community. This produces an internal tension which becomes especially acute in the present era of transnationalization of the state and the economy.

Giovanni Arrighi, "The Three Hegemonies of Historical Capitalism"

Gramsci's concept of hegemony is applied to interstate relations to account for both the invariance and the evolution of the modern world-system from its beginnings in Late-Medieval Europe to our days. It is argued that what made the United Provinces, the United Kingdom, and the United States hegemonic in their respective "worlds" was not their military might or superior command over scarce resources as such, but their predispositions and capabilities to use either or both to solve the problems over which system-wide conflicts raged. The changes in the nature of these problems and, therefore, in the conditions of the rise and decline of world hegemonies are explored, and some provisional hypotheses concerning the future of the modern world-system are advanced.

Terence K. Hopkins, "Note on the Concept of Hegemony"

The Dutch, British, and U.S. hegemonies ought to be associated, respectively, with the rise, dominion, and decline of the modern world-system. The period of Dutch predominance and the development of the institutional framework of historical capitalism eliminated the possibility that the emergent world-economy might be transformed into a world-empire. British hegemony was accompanied by the consolidation of stateness/interstateness and the incorporation or destruction of other historical social systems. The U.S. period of hegemony, by contrast, has been witness to the emergence of trans-state structures and social movements which may foretell the end of the modern world-system.

Review, XIII, 4, Fall, 1990

Bernard Mommer, "Oil Rent and Rent Capitalism: The Example of Venezuela"

The nature of oil rent--as net income to landlord or as compensation for depletion of "natural capital"--is reviewed and the ideological bases of the concept criticized. The concept is then matched against the empirical reality of how the National Accounts of Venezuela handles oil income, given that the United Nations accounting system that is used ignores the category of rent. The article then discusses the measurement of the importance of oil income and the distribution of oil rents in Venezuela. It is argued that this analysis is valid for all oil-exporting and mineral-extractive countries.

Gueorgui Derluguian, "Social Decomposition and Armed Violence in Post-Colonial Mozambique"

Armed violence in post-colonial Mozambique derives from the degeneration of colonial peasantry into a marginalized "non-class." Precolonial African rural producers were forced into being peasants (i.e., a class) in the process of peripheralization. Catastrophic/revolutionary decolonization led to Mozambique's disengagement from the world-system and the rapid disappearance of colonial class categories. A simple return to the precolonial situation was impossible, but so was integration into a supposedly alternative socialist world-system, since the latter never possessed truly systemic qualities. Thus, postrevolutionary Mozambique went into a social nowhere, a historical "black hole." Mozambican peasantry became an ex-peasantry, or rather, a non-peasantry. Thereupon, atavistic quasi-zoological forms of sociality came to the surface, often making weapons the only source of law and thus producing a war which fragmented into a myriad of different conflicts. But common to all those conflicts was their non-political nature and the embarrassing lack of ideological or any other "modern" type of motivation.

Michael Merrill, "The Anticapitalist Origins of the United States"

After winning its independence from Great Britain in 1783, the United States faced a choice between two different development strategies: a "capitalist" strategy favorable to the interests of the monied elite and an "agrarian" strategy favorable to the interests of the working classes. Policies consistent with the former had been the basis of European statecraft for a long time. But the latter enjoyed widespread popular support, and had recently been given a significant intellectual and moral boost by the publication of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations in 1776. In the United States, an agrarian electoral majority was forged in the 1790's that opposed capitalist development policies. Built upon a self-conscious class of farmers and artisans, this bloc retarded the development of capitalism in the United States and laid the basis for the world's first mass democracy.

Jean-Yves Grenier, "La notion de croissance dans la pensée économique française au 18 siècle"

French economic thought of the eighteenth century did not use the concept of growth or development, it had several other tools of analysis which permit one to see it had views about development: the concept of stability and harmony defining a presumed "natural" economic order; the mechanism of an economic circuit; agricultural productivity; net product; the theory of stages; the debate about the economic utility of luxury. Finally, the debate about liberalism and the normative considerations evoked to favor economic activity are reviewed in this light, with particular reference to the discussions about grain liberalism, fiscal measures, and public works, monetary policy, and the interest rate.

Review, XIV, 1, Winter, 1991

Jose Carlos Escudero, "The Logic of the Biosphere, The Logic of Capitalism--Nutrition in Latin America"

Two causal categories are advanced in the multicausal problem of malnutrition worldwide: the establishing of a world-economy from the sixteenth century onwards, and the commodification of food in capitalism. As for the former, the ecological benefits of a worldwide distribution of the most efficient crops were minor in comparison with the demographic and economic collapses in the peripheral regions subject to European invasion, a situation which lasts to this day in the center-periphery dichotomy of the world-economy. As for the latter, the capitalist need to add value to the commodity, food, causes widespread malnutrition. Two empirical examples are used to describe the "logic of capitalism," which acts against the "logic of the biosphere": a greatly increasing use of mostly non-replaceable fossil fuel energy to produce nutritional energy for human consumption; and an increasing use of grains and fish as fodder, instead of in direct human consumption. The problem of malnutrition worldwide is seen as political, since the production of food in the planet is in excess of the needs of the current world population; and it is these political decisions that prevent this "logic of the biosphere" outcome from taking place.

Michel-Rolph Trouillot, "Anthropology As Metaphor: The Savage's Legacy and the Postmodern World"

The postmodernist wave in philosophy and literature has influenced a reflexive critique of ethnography as text in North America. The author argues that this critique does not go far enough. Anthropology did not create the savage. Rather, the trilogy "savage-utopia-order" made anthropological discourse possible. A radical critique of the discipline entails an examination of the geopolitical and ideological context that gave rise to, and sustained, this trilogy. The task is to assess anthropology's role in a world from which this trilogy itself is disappearing.

Anjan Ghosh, "Stricture of Structure, or the Appropriation of Anthropological Theory"

In anthropology, data, though gathered mainly in the periphery, is appropriated as knowledge in the metropole, since concept building and theory construction remain metropolitan prerogatives; and this results in the disarticulation of endogenous modes of thought.

Bipan Chandra, "Colonial India: British versus Indian Views of Development"

Two divergent theories of economic development were evolved by the British and Indians during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The two had divergent social perceptions of the nature of economic changes taking place in colonial India. While, according to the British, India was undergoing the process of rapid economic development, the Indians came to hold that India was economically under-developing. They argued that India's economic backwardness was not a carry-over of its precolonial past but a consequence of the colonialization of the Indian Economy. They therefore set out to analyze the nature, the economic mechanisms, and the basic features of British colonialism in India. Consequently, the measures that the British and Indians suggested for overcoming India's economic backwardness were also different from and often in opposition to each other. The measures suggested by the Indians would have cut at the very roots of colonialism. During the 1930's and 1940's, both the British and Indians continued to function within the framework evolved in the nineteenth century, except that the Indians evolved another feature--commitment to planning, the public sector, and social justice.

Review, XIV, 2, Spring, 1991

Ganeshwar Chand, "The United States and the Origins of the Trusteeship System"

The influence of the United States on the postwar colonial situation has been tremendous. Since 1939, the U.S. publicly had espoused a policy of political independence of the colonial countries. By 1943, the concept of "Trusteeship System" came to occupy the central place in the U.S. proposals for decolonization. Colonies were to be placed under this system, and the trustees were to guide them towards eventual political autonomy. These aspects of the U.S. stand and policies have received wide publicity and academic attention. The widely accepted view so far has been that the U.S. was driven to this stand by a fundamental concern for the welfare of the colonial people. It is argued in this paper that this is far from the truth. The origin of the Trusteeship System lies not in any ethical or moral consideration that the U.S. may have had for the colonial peoples, but rather in the conflicting U.S. interests during the interwar, Second World War, and the postwar era. During this period, there emerged five basic, but contradictory, U.S. commercial, military, and political interests. It was in the resolution of these contradictions that the Trusteeship System took its form. Each of these interests and their impact on the U.S. stand on the colonies are discussed in this paper. The use of the Trusteeship System by the U.S. for its annexation of Micronesia is also discussed. Finally, the Soviet Union's position on the Trusteeship System is discussed; it is argued that in fact, and quite contrary to its declared stand of self-determination for the colonial people, the U.S.S.R., in return for U.S. support for its own annexationist attempts, had maintained a relative silence on the proposals for the Trusteeship System.

Louis Fontvieille, "Long Cycle Theory: Dialectical and Historical Analysis"

The inability of economic policies to solve the problems raised by the crisis reveals the limits of the economic theories on which they are based. Going beyond them assumes a dialectical approach based on the movement of contradictions, thus introducing history into the very heart of the theory. Applied to long-term fluctuations, this approach makes it possible to reveal the processes which lead to the blockage of the economic system at the end of the prosperity phase. It also leads to understanding the need for structural transformations during the phase of difficulties, thus leading to a new expansion phase.

David M. Gordon, "Inside and Outside the Long Swing: The Endogeneity/Exogeneity Debate and the Social Structure of Accumulation Approach"

A recurrent and perplexing theme in the literature on long swings is the debate about exogenous and endogenous sources of long-swing upturns and downturns. This paper first reviews the exogeneity/endogeneity debate, proposing some clarifications, and situates prevailing approaches to the analysis of long swings within that debate. It then elaborates the implications of the social structure of accumulation (SSA) perspective for the exogeneity and/or endogeneity of long swings, comparing it with other available perspectives. Finally, as a substantive contribution to that debate, it presents a variety of econometric evidence suggesting that the relations of institutional power and conflict which the SSA perspective highlights (a) were exogenous to both the upturn and the downturn of the most recent long swing in the United States and (b) were exogenous as well to the process of technological innovation emphasized by the recent neo-Schumpeterian literature.

Arnulf Grübler & Nebojsa Nakicenovic, "Long Waves, Technology Diffusion, and Substitution"

The long-wave phenomenon is described in terms of development trajectories which are driven by the diffusion of interrelated clusters of technological, organizational, and institutional innovations, and are punctuated by crises that emerge in the transition from an old saturating cluster to a new but yet uncertain development path. The approach is phenomenological, emphasizing in particular the diffusion and subsequent saturation of techno-economic paradigms and development trajectories that have led to previous Kondratieff upswing phases. The analysis identifies discontinuities and cross-enhancing and clustering in the diffusion of pervasive techno-economic systems, although the discontinuities between different clusters are not sharply focused, nor is the clustering phenomenon very rigid. Nevertheless, the beginning of pervasive diffusion processes and the onset of saturation is, to a large degree, correlated with the turning points identified in the long wave literature.

Review, XIV, 3, Summer, 1991

Samir Amin, "The Ancient World-Systems versus the Modern Capitalist World-System"

This paper offers a vision of the evolution of the historical world and the interrelation between the various centers of civilization since their early beginnings. It stresses two qualitative breaks, the first around 500-300 BC when the main various centers (China, India, the Hellenistic world) moved into tributary social forms, the second in the sixteenth century AD when capitalism started in Europe. It focusses on the different patterns of core/peripheries relations specific to each of those two kinds of world-systems.

Peter J. Taylor, "Political Geography Within World-Systems Analysis"

Political geography has been transformed from "moribund backwater" to being one of the major growth areas of geography in the 1980's. In its reconstruction it illustrates the fundamental debate between state-centric and world-systems analysis. Both sides of this debate are rehearsed, and a "creative tension" is sought. It is argued that world-systems analysis could learn from state-centric studies of state apparatuses and that orthodox state theorizing requires a multiple state dimension. Finally, in a "political geography beyond the state," the world-systems approach is employed to generate a taxonomy of fourteen distinctive politics.

Lanny Thompson, "The Structures and Vicissitudes of Reproduction: Households in Mexico, 1876-1970"

This study describes the basic household structures of the popular classes in the historical context of the Mexican transition from a peripheral zone to an industrialized semiperiphery. Five basic household types are considered: (1) marginal, (2) subsistence-centered, (3) wage-centered, (4) campesino, and (5) market-oriented. These historical types are located within the specific context of the periodicities of labor force formation in central Mexico during the years 1876-1970, which in turn are situated within the general context of long waves of the world-economy.

Jon Davies, "Letter from Tyneside in the Semiperiphery of the Semicore: A U. K. Experience"

The European section of the world-economy is moving its core. The British economy is following this move; but the British state appears to be going the other way, seemingly determined to preserve political sovereignty on the basis of an increasingly centralized state. This is, however, merely a preparatory centralizing of functions so that they can be all the more effectively surrendered to the force of the European market. Britains' peripheral zones (the medieval "marches" of the then-expanding English state) are being reintegrated into capitalist practices by a government clearly seeking to locate the final triumph of capital in the greater Europe to the south. We are all capitalists now.

Dieter Senghaas, "Friedrich List and the Basic Problems of Modern Development"

In the last few decades, the work of Friedrich List was not much referred to within development research and the political debate about development requirements. This is very strange, since Friedrich List conceptualized most succinctly the modern development problematic. Basically every major issue that has been raised within the modern development debate had been formulated already by this classical author during the first half of the nineteenth century. List was no abstract theorist; rather, he related his theorizing to the practical problems of delayed development. Although he is most remembered for his infant industry argument, his understanding of development processes was quite complex and multifaceted. He was a political economist in the broad sense of the term, covering the impact of political structure, social stratification, culture, and motivation on the direction and the speed of development. He had a clear understanding of the interface between the structure of the world-economy and its impact on the development dynamics of individual societies depending on their location within the hierarchy of what came to be called the world-system. Most of his recipes for development programs and projects are still relevant. If there is one classical author in the history of development theory, that title should go to List.

Review, XIV, 4, Fall, 1991

Bolívar Echeverría, "Modernidad y capitalismo: Quince tesis"

El "proyecto" que parece subyacer bajo las realizaciones de la historia moderna se encuentra en crisis. ¿Hay en el posibilidades válidas, aún no exploradas, de organización de la vida civilizada o es un proyecto que se ha agotado definitivamente? Este es el marco problemático dentro del que se desevuelve la argumentación del presente artículo. Su afirmación principal consiste en relativizar históricamente ese proyecto y en presentarlo como una alternativa en medio de otras que pudieron también relizarse en el pasado y que tal vez puedan realizarse en el futuro. El interés de esta relativización reside en el modo como se define y pone en relación esencial los conceptos de la modernidad, lo europeo y lo capitalista. Resulta interesante también la aproximación que se propone a temas como violencia y vida moderna, escritura y modernidad y a la discusión en torno al premodernismo, modernismo y postmodernismo como fenómenos culturales. La modernidad no sería "un proyecto inacabado" como lo juzga Habermas, sino un proyecto que debe ser replanteado desde sus fundamentos.

Robert A. Denemark, "The State in Zambia and Chile: The Role of Linkage to the World-Economy"

This work questions whether the degree to which a country is linked to the world-economy by the extent of its trade moderates the effects of the world-system on subsequent social, political, and economic development. Arguments for and against such a proposition are reviewed. Chile and Zambia are offered as critical case studies, similar in many important ways but differing significantly in terms of their linkage (defined as the ratio of exports to GNP) to the world-economy. State strength being a central and well-defined variable in the world-systems literature, an extensive review of the development of the state apparatus in both countries is offered. Should linkage make a real difference, alternate patterns of state strength or weakness would be observed. No such differences are noted. On the strength of the case studies, a review of the dominant alternative explanation, and the theoretical arguments, I conclude that (1) contrary to many critics of the world-systems perspective, trade is a truly fundamental variable; (2) that differences in the simple nominal measures of linkage do not affect trade's impact; and (3) that prospects for the non-core states of the world-system are strongly limited.

Dave Broad, "Global Economic Restructuring and the (Re)Casualization of Work in the Center: With Canadian Illustrations"

This essay is an attempt to unveil the global and historical roots of the contemporary casualization of work in the center states of the capitalist world-system. Theories of work and labor market transformation are discussed, and their one-sidedness criticized. In particular, the narrow national focus of most studies is critiqued. The notion of many feminists that historical materialism is not sufficient as a method for analyzing gender issues is also examined. It is argued that it is not the deficiency of the method, but the application that is generally at fault. The author then proceeds to map the historical latitude and longitude of proletarianization of labor, arguing that full-time proletarian labor has always been awash in a sea of non-proletarian labor, and that capitalists have always resorted to the so-called informal economy in their drive to accumulate capital. The struggles of workers themselves have maintained the process of proletarianization. The gains won by workers in the West in the twentieth century have pushed capital to advance a recasualization of work and a resuscitation of the informal economy to reduce labor costs and weaken trade unions. This explanation is used to situate the post-Second World War increase in part-time work in Canada, and to offer some prognoses for the future of work.

Review XV, 1, Winter, 1992

Boaventura de Sousa Santos, "A Discourse on the Sciences"

The epistemological crisis of modern science, conceived as a final crisis, is discussed in terms of a paradigmatic transition. Though the exact configuration of the emergent paradigm is unknown, the emphasis seems to be shifting towards a prudent knowledge for a decent life. Four topics are discussed: (1) as the distinction between nature and society breaks down, there will be a supercession of the dichotomy between the natural and the social sciences under the aegis of the later; (2) the emergent form of knowledge reconstitutes local cognitive projects and converts them into illustrated total knowledge: knowledge is thus both local and total; (3) because, paraphrasing Clausewitz, the object is the continuation of the subject by other means, all knowledge must be understood as self-knowledge; (4) finally, all scientific knowledge aims at becoming an enlightened common sense, which is the precondition of any emancipatory praxis.

Pauline Rosenau, "Modern and Post-Modern Science: Some Contrasts"

Two forms of post-modernism challenge modern science today and neither offers much improvement in the form of a viable alternative. This is not an argument for the superiority of modern science in any of its various versions. It is, rather, a statement about the inadequacy of all formulations of science, modern and post-modern. Modern science requires so much qualification that broad and far-reaching interpretations are precluded. Skeptical post-modernism deconstructs modern science Without bothering about formulating a substitute. Affirmative post-modernism also undertakes a thoroughgoing criticism of modern science, but it is more optimistic and seeks to construct new forms of post-modern science. The views of these two post-modernisms and those of modern science are compared and critically assessed. At best skeptical post-modernism offers only a dismal negativism and at worst it points to nihilism. Affirmative post-modernism offers an opening up of science to the metaphysical and the mystical, thus facilitating a synthesis of science and theology. Its pluralism permits us to say anything we want; what results may be fascinating, but it can also be absurd and post-modernism provides no criteria to differentiate between the two.

Isabelle Stengers, "Les 'nouvelles sciences', modèles ou défi?"

The basic argument is a criticism of the epistemological construct that what is common to the sciences is an identical ideal of rational description. In this view, such an ideal has been fully implemented in sciences such as physics and chemistry while other sciences still find "obstacles" in the way. If there is a message of the "new sciences" to the social sciences, it is that such a construct is a trap. Some of the main elements of what a rational description was said to be are now precisely the targets for a "reconceptualization." In the process, it is becoming clear that both their traditional and their new meaning are restricted to the experimental sciences. The conclusion is that the idea of an identical ideal should be forsaken, and that so-called "obstacles," which define in a negative way the (interesting) difference between laboratory and historical, social beings, should be restated as a challenge, requiring the invention of relevant scientific practices which give a positive meaning to this difference. Those social sciences which are already in this process of invention have nothing in particular to learn from the "new sciences."

Richard Lee, "Readings in the 'New Science': A Selective Annotated Bibliography"

In this sampling of the literature--under the rubrics Undecidability, Uncertainty and Complexity; Macrostructures: Systems and the Human Scale (Entropy, Dynamical Systems, Computation); The Very Big and the Very Small: Physics, Astrophysics and Cosmology; Time; Culture and Epistemology--the emphasis is on the complexity brought to focus in studies of dynamical systems. The recent flowering of this work, characteristically scornful of traditional disciplinary boundaries, evidences, shift to relation over substance, synthesis over reduction, simulation over analysis.

Review, XV, 2, Spring 1992

Carlos Antonio Aguirre Rojas, ``Between Marx and Braudel: Making History, Knowing History''

This article seeks to establish an analytical and critical comparison between some of the central contributions of Fernand Braudel especially his theses on geohistory, the longue durée, and material civilization and the principal theoretical arguments in the work of Karl Marx. Resituating the basis of Braudel's work within the methodological paradigms of the ``first'' Annales (that of Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre), the article compares these paradigms with the corresponding paradigms of the materialist conception of history. Finally, in a wider perspective, the article tries to assess the comparative contribution of the Marxist critical project and that of the Annales in general, and Braudel (the greatest historian of the twentieth century) in particular.

Giovanni Arrighi, Terence Hopkins & Immanuel Wallerstein, ``1989, The Continuation of 1968''

1989 is a continuation of 1968 despite the fact that, on the surface, the ideological representation seems opposite. If there was a parallel between the Paris and the Prague of 1968, there was also a parallel between the ``creeping May'' of Italy and the ``creeping spring'' of Poland in terms of the social bases of the movements. But in eastern Europe, instead of ``restructuring,'' there was a repression. As it took a ``wind of madness'' to institutionalize change in western Europe after 1968, so it took a ``wind of madness'' in eastern Europe in 1989. This 1989 finale of the 1968 world revolutionary rehearsal lacked the optimism of 1968 but also finally swept away some of the illusions. The key problem for putative antisystemic movements, now that states are in decline, is the search for a renewed ideology, from which can be derived a middle-run strategy.

Ad M. van der Woude, ``The Future of West European Agriculture: An Exercise in Applied History''

In his La Méditerranée, Fernand Braudel introduced the three-level scheme of social time with the concepts ``histoire structurelle (quasi-immobile),'' ``histoire conjoncturelle,'' and ``histoire événementielle'' and ascribed to each its own pace of development. He also emphasized the importance of long-term developments (la longue durée) in historical analysis. Aided by these critical insights the author first tries to prognosticate the possible developments in European agriculture up to the middle of the next century. Then he confronts his findings with those of historians of agriculture (especially Slicher van Bath) who studied secular developments in agriculture in the European past, in order to determine how his prognostication fits in with their findings. The application of historical knowledge to expected developments might contribute to put these in the right perspective and to evaluate the consequences of such developments in more detail.

Fernando García Argañarás, ``The Mechanisms of Accomodation: Bolivia, 1952-71''

A characterization of the ``prebendary-corporatist state form'' one in which mechanisms of domination and control combine coercive and semicoercive relations such as militarism and clientelism is offered. After a brief development of the concept, the major historical, political, and economic factors in Bolivian state policies from 1952 71 are analyzed.

Review, XV, 3, Summer 1992

Christopher Chase-Dunn, ``Introduction: The Comparative Study of World-Systems''

This introduction reviews major debates among scholars from several disciplines who are comparing the modern world-system with earlier world-systems. Considered are the problems of conceptualizing world-systems, the spatial bounding of world-systems, and understandings of systemic logic. The articles in this special issue of Review are discussed within the context of these theoretical problems.

Jonathan Friedman, ``General Historical and Culturally Specific Properties of Global System''

The purpose of this paper is to examine and attempt to clarify a set of relations that have often been conflated and confused and certainly undertheorized.

The first concerns the relation between global system and globalization. It has often been assumed that these terms refer to the same phenomena. Globalization in the cultural sense, or perhaps, the ideological sense, is not the same as the emergence of the global or world system. Globalization, a form of consciousness of the extent of globality, of the degree to which the local is globally informed or even formed, is a process that occurs within already existent global systems. It is a process that occurs periodically. It is not a world historical phenomenon characteristic of the past century or the past 25 years as some have contended. The second aspect of globalization is the degree to which it is a product of intellectual consciousness in the center or in all elite groups of the global system, or a more general phenomenon. We argue here that globalization as it is used in contemporary discussions is a product of center intellectuals struggling for a distinctive understanding of culture. A more objective notion of globalization would transport it further back into the history of the global system, pointing out the force of global connections, transfers and local/global articulations from the earliest periods of expansion. Modern globalization ideology concerns Western self-identity and self-consciousness more than objective global cultural and social processes.

The second relation is that between the formation of global systems and the generation of modernity as a cultural form. I argue here that culture is not perhaps a proper term, in spite of the ease of its use. This is because the notion of culture itself a bounded set of attributes associated with a given population, and which may be diffused, is itself a product of the way identity is contituted in the global system. It is argued that ``identity space'' might be more adequate to the task of understanding the way in which global processes, via their effect on the transformation of sociality tend to produce a number of parameters that are associated with what is called modernity. From this point of departure, it is possible to consider the notion of modernity trans-historically and in relation to previously existing global systems. A number of suggestions are made as to how a comparative analysis of modernities might be carried out in such a framework.

Randall Collins, ``The Geopolitical and Economic World-Systems of Kinship-Based and Agrarian-Coercive Societies''

Some patterns of geopolitical and market dynamics are suggested which hold across all types of political and economic organization. Stateless societies do not exist in a vacum, but are organized both by military relations with their neighbors and by kinship exchange systems which have many of the dynamics of market tructures. Kinship ``markets,, exchange sexual property and thereby establish trade links and military alliances among culturally distinct groups. Insofar as domestic legitimacy follows geopolitical power-prestige, kinship ``rules'' and their supporting mythologies are ideologies arising in response to geopolitical conditions. The dynamics of social change follows a combination of the geopolitical processes of alliance, conquest, and migration; plus the tendency of the marriage market toward increasing inequality between alliance-rich and alliance-poor kinship groups, culminating in the destruction of this form of market in a ``kinship revolution.'' The result is the rise of state-organized societies which coercively extract surplus from agrarian production. These agrarian-coercive societies are driven onwards in turn by their geopolitical relations and market dynamics with external groups.

Patricia O'Brien ``The `World-System' of Cahokia within the Middle Mississippi Tradition''

Cahokia, near St. Louis, is the dominant Mississippian polity in the American Bottoms. This state-like polity existed from A.D. 850-1400, but dominated the central U.S. from A.D. 1000-1300. Its core area manufactured sumptuary prestige goods for a ruling elite, but mundane exchange of cherts, sandstones and probably foodstuffs occurred. Through a network of fortified towns it extracted copper from upper Michigan, mica from the Carolinas, and meat and hides from the Sioux City region, all part of its periphery. It also extracted tribute, most likely warriors and/or slaves, from these and other peripheral polities.

Richard Blanton, Stephen Kowaleski & Gary Feinman, ``The Mesoamerican World-System''

Prehispanic Mesoamerica was made up of several spatially discrete core regions, boundary zones between these cores, and peripheries (the latter are not considered here). We argue that the characteristic political and economic strategies employed in the core regions can be productively contrasted with the characteristic boundary strategies. Core and boundary strategies dominated distinct phases of long cycles of the world-system, but both contributed to the institutional arrangements and culture of the Mesoamerican world.

Steadman Upham, Gary Feinman & Linda Nichols, ``New Perspectives on the Southwest and Highland Mesoamerica: A Macroregional Approach''

The political economy of the late prehispanic period in the Southwest and Mesoamerica is examined through the use of a multi-scale approach that considers and gives interpretive weight to macroregional relations. This examination is grounded in a review of the two theories that have dominated interpretations of Southwestern and Mesoamerican prehistory, diffusionism and developmentalism. The macroregional perspective we advocate draws interpretive insight from bot theories, although aspects of each framework are rejected or altered. At the same time, a few modifications to world-systems theory are advanced based on empirical analyses of archaeological and historical data.

Mitchell Allen, ``The Mechanisms of Underdevelopment: An Ancient Mesopotamian Example''

Analyses of pre-capitalist world-systems tend to focus on the large-scale analysis of whole systems. Rarely has the empirical evidence for specific historical places and moment been closely examined using the world-systems lens. This paper uses published cuneiform texts and archaeological data in a micro-level analysis of a specific moment in the Ancient Mesopotamian system, showing the mechanisms leading to underdevelopment in the periphery. The nineteenth century BC Assyrian trading colony at Kanesh on the Anatolian plateau has been one of the most intensively studied settings in the ancient world. Scholars have variously characterized it as Assyrian military imperialism, administered trade, and primitive entrepreneurship, though the historical information available to us conforms to none of these models. This article places Kanesh in the broader world-system network of its time. It then examines the hidden structure of trade through an understanding of the role of the Assyrian state and in culturally embedded inequality in trade relations that had existed already for millenia between the two parties. This structure was operationalized through the ``Three C's of Underdevelopment'' which allowed the Assryians to control Anatolian trade-- cooptation of elites, control of credit, and currency manipulation. Examples from other parts of the Mesopotamian world-system, and a comparison with the British ``informal empire,'' show that these same mechanisms have been operating to foster inequality for five millenia.

John Fitzpatrick, ``The Middle Kingdom, the Middle Sea, and the Geographical Pivot of History''

This paper argues that from around 4000 BC to 1400 AD, China should be regarded not as an enduring unified empire (subject to intermittent breakdowns) but as the inherently problematic core area of a constantly expanding multi-power or interstate system. It further asserts that in a second, critical phase around 800 AD to 1400 AD, southward economis and demographic expansion within agrarian China was also producing an embryonic, multi-state ``world-economy.'' It attributes the reconstitution of a unified ``world-empire'' in the closing centuries of this phase not to the inherent superiority of its Chinese core over external, barbarian powers, but precisely to the conjunctural military superiority of the Mongols. And it views the Mongol conquest a the apotheosis of an ``arid zone'' interstate system whose inner logic worked towards the recurrrent reconstitution of a unified empire, rather than as in the ``balance of power'' logic of the ``maritime zone'' system which emerged in early modern Europe towards an entrenched multi-state geopolitical order.

K. P. Moseley, ``Caravel and Caravan: West Africa and the World-Economies, 900 1900 AD''

Precolonial West Africa was shaped by two systems of long-distance trade: the more ancient, the trans-Saharan, based on North Africa and the Mediterranean, and the nascent capitalist system centered on Europe and the Atlantic. As opposed to the sharp dichotimization suggested by Amin and, more implicitly, by Wallerstein, the two trades were overlapping in their operations and quite similar in their effects. Both involved "mercantilist" elements and a traffic in slaves; both were associated with an intensification of production and the formation of states. They were also linked, of course, to the more global Eurasian network that Frank and Abu-Lughod have described, but only loosely so. Until the industrial revolution, the Islamic and European world-economies seem to have remained competitive and distinct, just as Africa retained substantial autonomy vis a vis both of them.

Review, XV, 4, Fall, 1992

Immanuel Wallerstein, ``The West, Capitalism, and the Modern World-System''

A central scholarly concern for two centuries now has been something called variously the rise of the West, the birth of the modern world, or the transition from feudalism to capitalism. The usual starting date assigned is circa 1500. Normally this is discussed as a success story.

The article reviews firts the literature about the differentia specifica of capitalism, and then the various accounts of the historical construction of a capitalist world. It discusses the answers to the ``puzzle'' of the occurrence of a transformation that was extremely unlikely. These answers are grouped in two categories: civilizational and conjunctural explanations.

Finally, a conjunctural explanation is offered, seeing the transformation as the result of a conjuncture of four collapses: the seigniors, the states, the Church, and the Mongols. This extraordinary conjuncture lifted all the constraints, and launched the world on an irrational adventure.

Barry K. Gills & Andre Gunder Frank, ``World System Cycles, Crises, and Hegemonial Shifts, 1700 BC to 1700 AD''

The authors explore the relationship between economic cycles and crises of accumulation and their relation to hegemonic shifts in the world system. Accumulation of surplus or capital accumulation is viewed as the ``driving force'' of the expansion and dynamic of the world system over several thousand years rather than the conventional 500 years of world-system theory. They identify a series of economic A and B phases of approximately 200 years duration going back at least to circa 1700 BC and a series of periodic general world system crises which include the simultaneous decline of inter-linked hegemonies and the rise of new hegemons. An epilogue refers to recent empirical tests/evidence of their phase/cycle datings.

Review, XVI, 1, Winter, 1993

Joan Smith, ``We Irish Women: Gender, History, and the World-Economy''

History is replete with the record of women. However, the notion that there is such a category that can be traced across time and space is seriously challenged. Rather, what should be the subject of an historical account is gendered relations and how these are articulated with forms of economic, social, and political institutions. In a review of a new anthology detailing the lives of Irish women this article argues that in the absence of that analysis there is a significant chance that the category ``women'' will be dislodged from its historical expression. As much as the world cannot be understood apart from the gendered relations that constitute it, conversely, gendered relations are meaningless in the absence of an account of their systematic connections to political, social, and economic structures. While there is nothing much new in this prescription of how to study gender and the socially organized ways it is constituted in much of the discourse concerning both gender and social structures, there is the predisposition to take the former as given while explicating the latter.

Çaglar Keyder, ``The Dilemma of Cultural Identity on the Margin of Europe''

Turkey has stood in an awkward position vis-a-vis Europe. While its elite declare a willingness to belong, its history and cultural legacy make it difficult for the inclusion to occur. On the Western side as well, the construction of a Greco-Roman cultural history has made the definition of Europe depend on the exclusion of Turkey as the alien presence. This article analyzes the spectrum of Turkish attitudes and political platforms relating to the West and, more specifically, to the European Community. It is argued that the confrontation with Europe has been the fundamental dimension of a politics of cultural identity in the Turkish context.

Nuno Valério, ``Local Economies and the World-Economy: Nineteenth Century Trás-os-Montes''

This article tries to illustrate the process of the expansion of the frontier of the modern world-economy with the case of the Portuguese province of Trás-os-Montes. Old local self-sufficient economies are integrated into wider economic spaces at different paces, which makes for a pattern of increasing heterogeneity among them during the first stages of the process (illustrated by the evolution of Trás-os-Montes until the last decade of the eighteenth century), and for a pattern of increasing homogeneity among them at later stages of the process (illustrated by the evolution of Trás-os-Montes during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries).

Eric Vanhaute, ``Processes of Peripheralization in a Core Region: The Campine Area of Antwerp in the `Long' Nineteenth Century''

By analyzing socioeconomic processes of transformation in the nineteenth-century Antwerp Campine (in the center of the core countries Belgium and the Netherlands) this article focuses on the study of trends of peripheralization in a regional context. It aims to draw the contour lines of an explanatory model evaluating the transformation processes within a capitalist division of labor. For this purpose, (a) an integrated research methodology is elaborated, (b) the main components of the rural social organization are defined, and (c) the processes of transformation in the organization of population, of labor, and of income and survival are analyzed. This analysis raises the final question: How are we to relate the internal ``resistance'' to the external ``integration''?

Henri H. Stahl, ``Théories des processus de 'modernisation' des Principautés Danubiennes et de l'ancien Royaume de Roumanie (1850 1920)''

The creation of the Kingdom of Romania in the period 1850 1920 as the result of the interacting pressures of great powers and internal social forces led to a process of political modernization and economic transformation, which in turn gave rise to an intellectual debate about both the appropriate state policies to be pursued and the conceptual understanding of Romania within the world-system.

Review, XVI, 2, Spring, 1993

Taimoon Stewart, ``The Third World Debt Crisis: A Long Waves Perspective''

This paper seeks to test empirically the hypothesis that debt crises erupt in the periphery of the world-economy every 50 to 60 years in the downswing of a Kondratieff cycle as a direct result of the strategies adopted by core capitalists to prolong the profit-making life of production in a technological cycle. A detailed empirical study of each Kondratieff cycle since 1782 is conducted in which the factors contributing to growth in the core's economy are examined. The research reveals a clear pattern of integration of the periphery into each technological cycle which had as its purpose the prolonging of the growth phase in the core through exports to the periphery. Such exports were financed by generous capital flows to the periphery as investment was directed away from equity investment because of excess industrial capacity and technological obsolescence in the core. Global economic contraction during the downswing of a technological cycle, low capital retention in the periphery, as well as the limited profit-making potential of the debt-incurring projects, deprive the periphery of the income that would allow debt-servicing, and this led to severe balance of payments problems, debt-servicing difficulties, and the eruption of a debt crisis. The effects of global contraction, which led to the eruption of the current debt crisis, are seen to have occurred prior to each debt crisis since 1782. It is argued in this article that the current Third World debt crisis is not an aberration from a workable development path embarked upon by the periphery, but rather is an integral part of the cyclical rhythms of the capitalist world-economy as capital seeks to maximize accumulation worldwide to the benefit of core capitalists.

Alvaro Soto Carmona, ``Long Cycle of Social Conflict in Spain (1868 1986)''

The most socially conflictual periods of contemporary Spanish history generally coincide with those of other industrialized countries, although their causes cannot be explained solely in terms of the turning phase of the economic cycle; political conditions are also decisive in explaining this increase in social conflict.

James A. Reilly, ``From Workshops to Sweatshops: DamascusTextiles and the World-Economy in the Last Ottoman Century''

This article examines the effects of the Industrial Revolution on textile weaving in Damascus and weavers' responses in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although Damascus weavers suffered greatly from European competition during the era of ``free-trade imperialism,'' their craft recovered and adapted in the decades that followed. Under market pressure, guild-based petty-commodity production based on small individually owned workshops gave way to protocapitalist forms of organization. Strikes and labor disputes accompanied downward pressure on workers' wages. Noticeable polarization occurred between owners of means of production and sellers of labor. The result by 1914 was neither full-fledged capitalist industry nor the earlier, guild-based system of manufacturing. Rather, the Damascus weaving industry was in transition, pushed along by Ottoman Syria's ongoing incorporation into the capitalist world-economy.

Luiz C. Barbosa, ``The World-System and the Destruction of the Brazilian Amazon Rain Forest''

The paper shows how the destruction and the preservation of the Brazilian Amazon rain forest are tied to Brazil's links with the capitalist world-economy. It divides the institutions, social groups, etc., affecting Brazilian ecopolitics into world-systemic and antisystemic agents. The systemic agents discussed are Brazilian military rule, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and multinational organizations. The antisystemic agents discussed are the environmental movement, both internationally and within Brazil, and grassroots resistance. These antisystemic agents exerted pressure on the government of major First World countries which in turn exerted pressure on international organizations to stop environmentally unsound projects in the forest. They counterbalanced the power of systemic forces, substantially changing the ecopolitics of the world-system. Their efforts were successful due to an increasing public awareness of the state of the global environment. Public opinion gave leverage to antisystemic forces. The paper concludes by arguing that the survival of democratic institutions in Brazil is imperative for a continuing debate on the state of the Brazilian environment.

Review, XVI, 3, Summer, 1993

Peter Waterman, "Social-Movement Unionism: A New Union Model for a New World Order?"

Traditional socialist trade-union theories or models have not prevented the frequent isolation of labor from other democratic social movements, or the subordination of labor struggles to the ideologies and interests of other categories and classes. Such understandings are today an obstacle to emancipatory strategies. Theory related to the new social movements (1) surpasses the notion of a single class identity and interest, (2) undermines a view of society as dominated by the economic and political spheres, and of social struggle as progressing from the first to the second, (3) suggests positive new relations between class, popular and democratic interests and demands, (4) provides a base for a new relationship with political parties, and (5) proposes a new view of the global and a new kind of internationalism. A ten-point theoretical/strategic definition of "social-movement unionism" is offered which stresses the necessity and possibility for an intimate articulation of unionized with other workers, of labor with other social forces, and of shop-floor democracy with shop-floor internationalism. A test case offered to illustrate the argument is that of the relationship between an Indian feminist strategy for working women and recent South African trade-union experience. The conclusion is that "social-movement unionism" offers a continuously renewable emancipatory strategy surpassing current liberal, populist, and socialist ones.

Jean Batou, "Nineteenth-Century Attempted Escapes From the Periphery: The Cases of Egypt and Paraguay"

In the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century, Egypt and Paraguay experienced the rapid growth of modern industry. Between 1815 and 1850, Egypt developed diversified consumer and producer goods industries, supplied by homemade machinery and equipment. Later on, from 1850 to 1865, Paraguay went through strikingly similar developments, even though these changes were less thorough and prolonged. But this was not a "natural" process brought about by the increasing worldwide division of labor. On the contrary, it signified the substitution of a deliberate economic policy for the "invisible hand" of the international market: Both countries pioneered in producing the general outline of a state plan for modernizing a country with no significant industrial bourgeoisie. For that reason, their eventual failures, following devastating foreign military interventions, have given rise to much controversy. Were they due to the unripeness of overall socioeconomic conditions, to some cultural factors, to the deliberate character of the enterprises, to the shortage of time, to the lack of adequate protection against foreign competition, or to western diplomatic and military interventions? All these hypotheses are discussed in order to gauge the historical relevance of these early attempts at state-led industrialization in Egypt and Paraguay, before Meiji Japan or Czarist Russia.

Michael S. Yoder, "The Latin American Plantation Economy and the World-Economy: The Case of the Yucatecan Henequen Industry"

Agave fiber crops, including henequen and sisal, are among the domesticated plants native to the American Tropics that have been diffused to tropical zones on other continents. This diffusion has been carried out by entrepreneurial agents of the core states of the world capitalist system interested in establishing numerous source areas of fiber crops to maintain cheap, reliable supplies. One result has been to pit different tropical regions of the periphery, heavily dependent upon fiber production, against one another, ensuring low prices and poverty for these regions, while enhancing profits for the core. This paper traces the role of the globalization of agave fiber crops in the generation of poverty and the maintenance of dependency in Yucatan, Mexico, the original culture hearth of these plants.

Yrjö Kaukiainen, "Finland and the Core: Stages of Integration (ca. 1600-1850)"

The article focusses on the economic relations between the developed core areas of Europe and a periphery, Finland, from the Middle Ages to the late nineteenth century. Particular emphasis is laid on the role of maritime transport, which not only affected the total economics of foreign trade but even in some degree explains the extent to which the commodity flows could be controlled by the core. Thus, the development in the export of bulky forest products from Finland, first tar and later sawn wood and timber, was inversely related to the general level of freight costs. High transport costs indicate that the supply of cargo space was the real bottleneck of the trade relations. Therefore, whoever was able to control the transport was able to control the entire commodity flow. However, the ability to control not only depended on economic power but on military power as well, as the rise of Sweden in the seventeenth century demonstrates. It was only during the late nineteenth century that the huge growth in transport potential robbed shipping of its former key position and made the control over natural resources and other factors of production more important.

Matti Peltonen, "The Peasant Economy and the World Market: Finnish Peasant Farming in the Age of Agrarian Crises, 1880's-1910's"

The article explains why the Agrarian Question in Finland is perceived as a problem of tenant farming, and how this limited view of the economic difficulties of agricultural production is related to the structural transformation of Finnish agriculture in late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The data used are valuation instruments of the Finnish Land Mortgage Bank covering the technical and economic development of peasant farming and the development of ground rent from the 1860's to the early 1910's. This data is supplemented by information about 1200 independent agricultural households and 560 tenant households gathered by the state disability insurance committee, which investigated the incomes of all households in five different localities. Finnish peasant farming was not very commercial at the beginning of the twentieth century. Only about one-third of the total value of all agricultural production including forestry and excluding inputs produced on the farm was sold. The use of non-family labor was quite common on peasant farms, the most important part being the work of annually hired agricultural servants. All farms specialized in dairy farming, especially small and tenant farms. Over two-thirds of cash income from agricultural produce on landowner households and nine-tenths on tenant farms came from animal husbandry. Many farms, however, had problems of profitability, reflected in the rising ground rent level. ln Finland most landowners were peasants, and so the problems of tenant farming were experienced as a contradiction between two strata of peasant farmers--landowners and crofters. Futile reforms in the land lease legislation led to a crisis at the beginning of the twentieth century, which could be solved only by allowing all tenant farmers to become landowners themselves. This reform in production relations started a more distinct development towards the family-farm model common in industrialized countries.

Review, XVI, 4, Fall, 1993

Resat Kasaba, ``Izmir''

Between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries, Izmir grew from a small town of 2,000 inhabitants to a major port with a population of over 200,000. The growth of this city occurred in two distinct phases. The first took place in the sixteenth century, when the eastern Mediterranean became a center of attention for the competing European powers of Holland, France, England, and the Italian cities. In these years, Izmir became a transit port for the European trade with Asia. The second period of expansion took place in the second half of the eighteenth century and during the nineteenth century, when Izmir became the major port of export for the agricultural products of western Anatolia. In both periods, an indegenous group of merchants who were mostly non-Muslims controlled the many aspects of the city's trade with the outside world. However, these groups were prevented from expanding their economic and political influence by the nationalist policies of the early twentieth century. Beginning in that period, the economic networks in western Anatolia and other parts of the Ottoman Empire were taken over by the military-bureaucratic elite and the Turkish bourgeoisie which they reared.

Elena Frangakis-Syrett, ``Patras''

This article studies the economy of Patras in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and traces its emergence as one of the principal ports in Greece, primarily as a result of a successful pattern of monoculture and of strong ties with British capital and market. Although other agricultural goods were produced for export, the local economy was completely dominated by the cultivation, mainly on the basis of small-scale independent proprietors, of currants for export. Although it prospered, with a noticeable growth in its domestic market in the course of the century and the development of an industrial sector (though mostly light industry) in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as the surplus from a prospering commerce was invested, Patras' economy remained heavily dependent on exports for its imports and on the fluctuations of the international market's demard for currants. Although credit availability improved, its market remained capital-thirsty, on the whole, and with a weak local currancy. When world demand for currants fell, despite elaborate rescue operations by the government, Patras found it difficult to meet the crisis created by the overproduction of currants and effectively diversify its economy.

A. Üner Turgay, ``Trabzon''

With the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca in 1774, Russia broke the trade monopoly held by the Ottomans in the Black Sea. In the following years, trade and navigaiton rights were gradually and grudgingly extended also to other nations. The Treaty of Adrianople in 1829 reiterated and expanded these rights. By this time, certain Ottoman trade patterns had been changed and the Black Sea had become the setting for intense economic and political rivalry involving the Ottoman state, Russia, and the major European powers. These changes naturally affected the position of Trabzon, an Ottoman port on the southeastern coast of the Black Sea. The revival of the old line of communications between Europe and Persia enabled Trabzon to regain its earlier importance as a trading center and transit port for Tabriz and beyond. The Trabzon-Erzurum-Tabriz route allowed European industrial products to enter markets deep in the eastern Ottoman provinces and Persia. It also provided an outlet for Persian and Ottoman produce to reach western European markets. Trabzon, subsequently, experienced rapid and fundamental social change. The emerging commercial opportunities attracted people from nearby towns and villages into the city to engage themselves in new occupations and services. By the middle of the nineteenth century, Trabzon had become an urban center. Early in the second half of the century, however, Russia, competing with the Ottoman state, opened an alternate trade route to Persia through the Caucasus. As a result, Trabzon's trade suffered and the population declined. This did little, however, to undermine the physical development and institutional expansion that had taken place earlier. Meanwhile, the reforms instituted by the Ottoman state throughout the Tanzimat period accelerated the transformation of Trabzon from a medieval town into a premodern city by the end of the century.

Basil C. Gounaris, ``Salonica''

Between 1830 and 1912, Salonica, the natural outlet of an extensive Balkan hinterland, experienced tremendous growth and prosperity. Though retail trade was the principal occupation in the city, in later years banking and industry contributed considerably to the creation of an influential local elite and a numerous working class, both consisting of Jews, Muslims, and Christians. As education spread to all social strata, the process of modernization was accelerated. European education, cosmopolitanism, constitutionalism, and socialism supported the integration of the multiethnic and multicultural society of Salonica but eventually proved unable to remove the deep roots of mutual mistrust and hatred between the millets.

Y. Eyüp Özveren, ``Beirut''

This paper traces the development of Beirut into a major eastern Mediterranean port in the course of the nineteenth century. The different phases of this development are spelled out in detail. It is argued that Beirut developed as a port-city in response to the stimulus of the world-economy as organized under the British hegemony as witnessed in the eastern Mediterranean. Beirut acquired distinct attributes in accordance with its port-city function. It differed in demographic composition, urban layout, and regional role from the cities of the Syrian interior, such as Aleppo and Damascus. It developed relations of interdependency with both other seaborne cities and its hinterland which served to accentuate and reproduce its specificity. Eventually, global economic changes forced Beirut to readjust itself to a less favorable context. The kinds of political projects formulated by the urban elite and the merchant stratum are traced back to such changes and are evaluated as a response to the new pressures emerging from within as well as from outside prior to the First World War. Beirut's new relationship as a capital city to its then-segmented hinterland is seen as the culmination of this long-term process.

Çaglar Keyder, Y. EyÖp Çzveren & Donald Quataert, ``Port-Cities in the Ottomon Empire: Some Theoretical and Historical Perspectives''

Port-cities were an important element of the nineteenth-century world-economy, constituting bridgeheads in the economic, social, and political transformation of the newly-incorporated areas. Within the Ottoman Empire port-cities could be distinguished through rapid population growth, predominance of commercial activity, and a distribution favoring foreigners and non-Muslin Ottomans. Port-cities also came to accommodate political movements of various hues, at times challenging the central authority, at other times aimed to establish autonomous governance at regional or municipal levels. As cities where the commercial bourgeoisie were found in concentration, they would be expected to provide the setting for nationalist and other modernist movements. This article traces port-city development in the Ottoman Empire and investigates the social and political implications of this development.

Review, XVII, 1, Winter, 1993

Andre Gunder Frank, ``Inside Out or Outside In?''

This is a critique of two articles by David Gordon for their reference to national economies. this more limited scope seems a step backward from Gordon's own earlier world-economy, world- system perspective in a debate with Ernest Mandel. Gordon's earlier perspective is preferable not the least because it also facilitates our analysis of endogeneity especially of lower turning points in long economic cycles, as opposed to Mandel's view of their exogeneity.

Stephen K. Sanderson, ``The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism: The Theoretical Significance of the Japanese Case''

There is considerable agreement that early modern Japan experienced a process of capitalist development closely corresponding to the emergence of capitalism in early modern Europe, but little has been made of this point with respect to a general theory of capitalist development. After surveying the literature on the development of capitalism in Japan, some of the most important theories of capitalist development are reviewed and criticized, providing a foundation for an alternative theory. It is argued that a critical factor in the rise of capitalism was the slow expansion of world commercialization from the beginnings of the first states around 5000 years ago to the sixteenth century AD. In the period from AD 1000 to AD 1500 world commercialization had developed sufficiently to trigger a major capitalist takeoff in those two parts of the world, Western Europe and Japan, that had the most suitable preconditions for capitalist development. These preconditions involved size, location, geography, demography, and feudal politico-economic arrangements. World transforming capitalism would eventually have emerged even in the absence of these preconditions, but such conditions greatly facilitated its development.

Mark Metzler, ``Capitalist Boom, Feudal Bust: Long Waves in Economics and Politics in Pre-Industrial Japan''

Between the 1690's and the 1840's, Japan experienced three long boom and bust cycles of approximately 50 years each. These long waves in economics correlated with a political dialectic of alternating `absolutist' centralization and feudal style decentralization, as with a social dialectic of contending bourgeois and feudal tendencies. Both the duration of these waves and the timing of the peaks and troughs is synchronous with suggested long waves in 18th century Europe, and continuous with long waves in the modern industrial era.

Review, XVII, 2, Spring, 1994

William H. McNeill, ``The Fall of Great Powers: An Historical Commentary''

Contemporary international politics are viewed and analyzed in light of comparable circumstances in the past. The author surveys 10,000 years of human history and discusses the rise of urban centers and the diffusion of major religions as key to understanding our present situation. While the 21st century brings new challenges to community building, the author is optimistic that humankind, always adaptable, will create new forms of community and political configurations to answer the seemingly intractable problems of global urbanity.

William G. Martin, ``The World-Systems Perspective in Perspective: Assessing the Attempt to Move Beyond Nineteenth-Century, Eurocentric Conceptions''

The world-systems perspective is now a well recognized area within the social sciences and, most notably, the discipline of sociology. To many the development of this field is only part of the general trend of intellectual specialization in this case the study of global social structures and change.

This essay rejects this analysis, evaluating the world-systems perspective as part of an ongoing crisis within sociology and the social and historical sciences. The world-systems project is accordingly scrutinized from an alternative position, asking whether and to what extent those working in this area have been successful in advancing a quite different project: the construction of world-relational conceptions that escape the limits of concepts and texts rooted in partial accounts of the development of Europe and North America.

Analysis is targeted at the methodological foundations of the field and, in particular, successive waves of conceptual and theoretical re-formulation surrounding such central terms as ``society,'' ``state,'' ``economy,'' ``labor/family,'' and ``social movements.'' The strength of these efforts is shown to be found not simply in shifting the unit of analysis and the investigation of large-scale constructs over long periods of time; more fundamental has been the displacement of conceptions of modern, Euro-North American ``societies'' as archetypes of social change and development.

Tariq Banuri, ``Noah's Ark or Jesus' Cross? UNCED as a Tale of Two Cities''

This paper looks at the various perspectives and experiences brought together at UNCED. The focus of the analysis is on differences in perceptions between the North and the South, as exhibited in the four ``sites'' of UNCED: inter-governmental negotiations, the NGO mela (or fair), the exercise in adult education through the mass media, and the forum for political leadership. The argument is that while the first three events were successful, the fourth was a total failure. As a result, while the process help identify and consolidate national positions, it did not make progress towards the creation of a global political or moral community, without which global collective action is inconceivable.

Wilma A. Dunaway, ``The Southern Fur Trade and the Incorporation of Southern Appalachia into the World-Economy, 1690 1763''

As a microcosm of the international struggle for global hegemony in the early 1700's, Southern Appalachia formed a buffer zone between British settlements in Virginia and the French in the Ohio Valley and between British Carolina and Georgia, Spanish Florida and the French entrenched in present-day Alabama and in the Mississippi Valley. Seeking to minimize contraction of their economic activities, England, France and Spain competed for political and economic control over the Indians of the American Southeast. The incorporation of Southern Appalachia as a peripheral fringe of the British coastal colonies entailed three historical transformations: (a) establishing political control over the Cherokees and their territory; (b) securing initial Appalachian markets for British commodities; and (c) European export of a white settler class into Southern Appalachia to supervise the region's first ``cash-crop'' production. The Cherokee economy underwent massive alteration of its relations of production and became restructured around export activity. Through their instigation of intertribal warfare and their treatment of the scattered Cherokee settlements as a unified corporate entity, the British coerced the indigenous society toward secular and national governance. Within fewer than 50 years, the Cherokees lost economic and political autonomy and became dependent upon the worldwide network of production.

Jim Mac Laughlin, ``Emigration and the Peripheralization of Ireland in the Global Economy''

This paper critiques behavioral and geographical explanations of new wave Irish emigration. It suggests that the former traces emigration to the aspirations and social attributes of Irish youg adults, thereby locating its causes and consequences in Irish youth enterprise culture. The latter explains emigration in simple geographical terms, attributing it to locational factors and Ireland's peripherality relative to the European Community. This paper adopts a world-system perspective, arguing that Irish emigrationcan be traced to the peripheral status of the Irish economy, in the global economy. Comparing new wave with historical Irish emigration, it suggests that Ireland still operates as an emigrant nursery in the world-economy. Thus it suggests that world-system theory allows for a political geography of emigration by recognizing the centrality of place to the process of emigration. It also stresses the importance of emigration in the construction and destruction of socio-economic space.

Review, XVII, 3, Summer, 1994

George Aseniero, ``South Korean and Taiwanese Development: The Transnational Context''

South Korea and Taiwan are widely regarded as NICs (``newly industrializing countries''), but in fact their industrialization began early this century when the Korean peninsula and the island of Taiwan were militarily annexed by Japan. Colonized but not peripheralized, they were developed under ``administrativce guidance'' by Tokyo as integral parts of a northeast Asian economy centered in Japan. Following the Second World War and the Korean War, the U.S. took over the ``administrative guidance'' of what were now the two most crucial front-line states in the Cold War confrontation in Asia. As privileged client-states, South Korea and Taiwan benefited from transnational resources (foreign aid, loans, investments) and opportunities (access to a U.S. market tolerant of their protectionist policies) for capitalist development unavailable anywhere else in the Third World, and early on emerged as favored sites for industrial relocation to U.S. and Japanese firms. Functioning as a semiperiphery in the regional capitalist order in the Pacific Rim and thus benefiting from the dynamic industrial product cycle operative there, these ``tigers'' progressively expanded their industrial base and their share of the world export market even as the world-economy steadily contracted through the 1980's. By the turn of the decade, however, rising production costs and increasing global competition drastically lowered profitability rates, compelling corporations in this semiperiphery to relocate in turn to the lower-wage-cost countries of the (Southeast Asian) periphery. In the 1990's, therefore, the East Asian semiperiphery is caught in a double-squeeze situation between a still-dominant center (the dual U.S.-Japan hegemony) and a periphery that, as it is progressively drawn into the industrial product cycle, tends to erode the competitive edge once held exclusively by South Korea and Taiwan.

Samir Amin, ``The Future of Global Polarization''

The industrialization of the Third World should not reduce the polarization at a global level, but only change its modus operandi. The core benefits from ``five monopolies'' (the control of global finance capital, technology, access to resources, communications and media, arms and mass destruction) which, together, reduce the industries in the periphery to a modern putting-out system, devalorizing labor and capital invested in productive activities, to the benefit of value added in the activities related to those monopolies.

Ramón Grosfoguel, ``World Cities in the Caribbean: The Rise of Miami and San Juan''

Prior studies about Caribbean cities and the city of Miami present them as isolated from each other. This paper conceptualizes the urban processes in the region as a system of cities within the world-system. Beyond the nation-states' boundaries, there is a global division of labor between Miami (core), San Juan (semiperiphery) and the rest of the Caribbean cities (periphery). Both Miami and San Juan are world cities exercising functions of management and control (financial, symbolic, and military) over the production process of the region's peripheral cities. Contrary to the economism that has characterized the world-city literature, here I argue for a world-system approach that articulates multiple global logics (economic, military, and symbolic) in the understanding of core-periphery relationships of the Caribbean city system.

Çaglar Keyder and Ayse Öncü, ``Globalization of a Third-World Metropolis: Istanbul in the 1980's''

The restructuring of the world-economy since the 1970's has been accompanied by major changes in the nature and dynamic of territorial and spatial processes, within and across regions, nations, and cities. As world regions are reconstituted through spatial shifts in investment and massive expansion of the radii of organizational control, a set of ``global cities'' or ``world cities'' have emerged at the intersection of global transaction networks. Within the context of these global trends, Istanbul in the 1990's appears to be at the threshold of such a major redefinition, poised to assume a new role as the nodal point of access and control at the intersection of emergent cross-regional networks. The article explores the prospects and expectations in this historical moment in terms of opportunities in the emergent cross-regional networks and constraints in the process of autonomization from the national arena, after briefly touching upon the city's historical specificity, and then outlining its economic and political transformation in the 1980's.

Review, XVII, 4, Fall, 1994

Mark Selden, ``Pathways from Collectivization: Socialist and Post-Socialist Agrarian Alternatives in Russia and China''

While ruling groups throughout east-central Europe renounced socialism and began to chart capitalist futures from the 1989-1990 overthrow of Communist Party rule and the disintegration of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, China's Communist Party reaffirmed socialist goals. Yet ironically, continuities with the collective regime are far greater in large parts of the former U.S.S.R. where collectives and state farms remain the centerpiece of the rural economy, than in China, where the Communist Party has promoted decollectivization and the restoration of family farm, a booming market, and proliferating rural small-scale enterprises under diverse ownership forms. This essay assesses this apparently paradoxical outcome through a close analysis of structural, historical, demographic, and technological factors that have shaped the collective and post-collective experiences in Russia and China and will structure future outcomes.

Anouar Abdel-Malek, ``Historical Initiative: The New `Silk Road'''

East Asia's momentous, protracted thrust in our times, often interpreted in ``economistic'' terms by Western liberal and Marxist analyses, in rooted in the realm of philosophy, in the communitarian, group, ethos, the specific product of the depth of its historical field. As such, East Asia, around its epicenter, China, is the core area of the Orient, resugent, sharing converging value systems and socio-political molds grudgingly, if at all, recognized, let alone accepted, by the reductionist globalist approach. Historical initiative, now rooted in the Orient(s), around East Asia, is developing a novel civilizational project: peace based on justice; human and social development; symbiotic solidarity; the united national front as the basis of strengthened social power; the resurgence of transcendance, spirituality, the centrality of the normative ethical, where specificities can converge in the making of non-antagonistic visions of universality the heartland of the making of our new world.

Rila Mukherjee, ``The Story of Kasimbazar: Silk Merchants and Commerce in Eighteenth-Century India''

Kasimbazar exists today as a small town in the province of Bengal, India. During the period under study it was the chief silk-producing area and the foremost market for silk in India. The study focuses on the trials and tribulations of local merchants supplying silk to the English East India Company in the eighteenth century. It deals specifically with their position both before and after the The Battle of Plassey of 1757 in Bengal. The battle resulted in the effective assumption of economic power by the English in Bengal. Finally the study also highlights the constraints of working within an unstable mercantile economy.

Patrizia Sione, ``Patterns of International Migrations: Italian Silk Workers in New Jersey, USA''

This article offers historical evidence on the pattern of nineteenth-century international migration to the United States from northern Italian areas of textile production. Silk and wool weavers and dyers, expelled by mechanizing mills in Como, Biella, and Schio, followed the path of the flows of European capital, technology, entrepreneurs, and other skilled workers, relocating to the United States with the restructuring of silk production. Italian workers had access to information flows that resulted from the integrated nature of European silk production, of which Como was a pivotal part, and from their traditional temporary migrations to the various textile centers within the Italian peninsula and Europe.

Review, XVIII, 1, Winter, 1995

Beverly J. Silver, Giovanni Arrighi, and Melvyn Dubofsky, eds., ``Labor Unrest in the World-Economy, 1870 1990''

This special issue of Review explores the links between the dynamics of labor unrest and the capitalist world-economy during the twentieth century. How have waves of labor militancy contributed to the evolution of the modern world-system? What opportunities and constraints are imposed on labor movements by the world-economy and the interstate system?

This special issue also introduces a major new database on world labor unrest based on newspaper reports from 1870 to 1990. The design and construction of the World Labor Research Working Group database are described in detail in Part I. The national and world-level patterns revealed by this important new source are analyzed in Parts II and III.

Review, XVIII, 2, Spring, 1995

Terisa E. Turner and Craig S. Benjamin, ``Not in Our Nature: The Male Deal and Corporate Solutions to the Debt-Nature Crisis''

In this article we delineate three dynamics of class composition, economic restructuring and gendered-class struggle which we argue are reflected in the promotion of debt for nature swaps as a component of the corporate solution to the debt-nature crisis. On the one hand capitalist restructuring of labour relations, the enclosure of natural resources and the debt-imposed assault on state spending, have brought on a `reproduction crisis' for the urban and rural poor. On the other hand, it is in the face of such enclosures, that broad based movements of women and men are struggling to retain or reappropriate popular control over the means of subsistence, and to exert locally defined values, meanings and forms of social relations in defense of the commons. To accept debt for nature swaps and other new enclosures as any sort of solution to the debt-nature crisis is to accept defeat for the popular struggle to restore the commons even as this struggle is finding its strength.

Salavatore Ciriacono, ``Land Reclamation: Dutch Windmills, Private Enterprise, and State Intervention''

There can be no doubt that there were different policies for land reclamation and drainage in early modern Europe. However, these policies had certain features in common and were deeply influenced by several factors. From the sixteenth century it was the private companies that played the leading roles in these programmes. In the same period there was a new wave of Flemish-Dutch settlers throughout Central and Northern Europe, in response to the demand for capital and know-how to invest in land reclamation. The state always played an important role in the German territories, and in the eighteenth century this role was reconfirmed both in the Prussia of the Hohenzzollerns and in Bavaria. Nevertheless here the state acted in unison with private investors attracted by the profits to be made from the settled estates.

Over the same period in France the state conceded substantial tax exemptions to encourage the cultivation of vast areas of uncultivated land. But the company set up by Humphrey Bradley, under the auspices of Henri IV at the beginning of the seventeenth century, had not managed to reclaim all the available marshland in France. Dutch capital had gradually been withdrawn because of the strong political and religious pressure put upon the Hugenot community. And in spite of all the publicity they enjoyed, the physiocrat policies of the eighteenth century did not achieve the successes expected of them. The reasons for this were a weak entrepreneurial sector, a fragmented national market and a tradionalist legislature.

In England, drainage schemes progressed in tandem with the capitalization of the courntyside; in fact, such schemes were of as much importance as the enclosures. Like the enclosures they were opposed by villagers and all those who earnt a living from the marshlands (the same resistence is to be found in other European areas). Yet from the middle of the seventeenth century onwards we can see the same symptoms as elsewhere: a fall in cereal prices with subsequent financial difficulties in the maintenance of drainage canals and a technological impasse about the use of Dutch windmills to power the drainage works. Here as elsewhere, it was the introduction of the modern steam pump which made it possible to overcome this situation of stasis.

Carl H. A. Dassbach, Nurham Davutyan, Jianping Dong & Barry Fay, ``Long Waves Prior to 1790: A Modest Contribution''

This paper has three objectives. First, to use the methodology developed by J. Goldstein in Long Cycles to examine three untested data sets on the purchasing power of gold, one from England and two from the United States, for evidence of long waves between 1790 and 1970. Secondly, to demonstrate the accuracy o